Ronald Reagan's Cold War strategy, well established in his first year in office, did not change: to make absolutely sure in the minds of the Soviets that they too would be destroyed in a nuclear war—even as Reagan sought an alternative through strategic defense to make nuclear missiles obsolete and thus eliminate the possibility of an all-out nuclear war.

These remarks were delivered at the November 2 Conference on Ronald Reagan, Intelligence and the End of the Cold War, co-sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Reagan Presidential Library. They were taped by C-SPAN for later airing.

The message of the election this year is not very different from the message in 1980: The government is too big, and it spends too much. Whether President Obama and the new Congress will be able to find a path from that message through the unlimited wants of government is the question...

On February 6, 1981, at his first National Security Council meeting, Ronald Reagan told his advisers: “I will make the decisions.” As Reagan’s Secret War reveals, these words provide the touchstone for understanding the extraordinary accomplishments of the Reagan administration, including the decisive events that led to the end of the Cold War.

The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolizes the end of the Cold War, just as the Wall itself for so long symbolized the division and competition between the communist East and the democratic West, between capitalism and socialism. . . .

In the last years of Ronald Reagan's life, his voluminous writings on politics, policy, and people finally emerged and offered a Rosetta stone by which to understand him. From 1975 to 1979, in particular, he delivered more than 1,000 radio addresses, of which he wrote at least 680 himself.

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